THEATER | Lamb Lays With Lion spit “Feminine Venom” at Nick and Eddie

Jeremey Catterton, artistic director of the fearless theater company Lamb Lays With Lion (LLwL), is moving to New York next week; he’s saying goodbye to Minnesota with a little song, a little dance, and a splash of menstrual blood.

Feminine Venom is one of the season’s funniest little shows: both funny-peculiar and funny-ha-ha. Catterton’s often adapted classic texts, but this time his inspiration isn’t anything as high-flown as Tennessee Williams or Anton Chekhov: it’s trashy novels and movies about women in prison. Feminine Venom is, as Catterton’s promotional text very accurately puts it, “a new LLwL performance featuring women as women in prison.”

Applying Catterton’s techniques of deconstruction and—both literal and conceptual—amplification to these campy texts is like putting frosting on frosting, or chasing a shot with a beer, or forming an E.L.O. cover band. In other words, it’s 200% awesome. Catterton is a practitioner of “theater of disruption,” but Feminine Venom is more theater and less disruption than previous LLwL shows I’ve seen—which only makes sense, because really, who would want to disrupt a hot topless makeout scene between two women standing in a kiddie pool in a bar while a woman on a ladder pours water over them?

Catterton, visible on stage as per LLwL custom, sits at a laptop curating a soundtrack for the hour-long pastiche, in which six women—including Daily Planet contributor Sheila Regan—fight, laugh, play, cry, and ultimately try to make a break for it. The translation of pulpy stories onto a DIY stage is the kind of thing commonly seen at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, but not with this much verve and style. The production steers into this material like a wronged wife barrelling the family Chevy into a tree with her husband in the passenger seat. Buckle your safety belt.